 My name is Vanessa Tyler. I'm in the School of Psychology at the University of Ottawa and I'm a scientist at the Breyer Research Institute and I'm the site lead for the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging at the Breyer Research Institute. The Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging is going to change the way that we think about aging in Canada. It's a huge study that is collecting a large amount of data on 50,000 Canadians over the course of 20 years and it's going to shed light on all kinds of fundamental questions about how we age in Canada, how we can age better in Canada and help us understand changes in health that happen as Canadians get older. I personally work on dementia and mild cognitive impairment and I'm very interested in the effect of bilingualism on the aging process. So I work with Ontarians, monolingual Ontarians and also bilingual Franco Ontarians and Quebecers to look at how bilingualism changes the way that we age cognitively and whether it has effects on how dementia manifests and progresses. The way that memory changes as we age depends on whether there are health problems that are causing cognitive changes or not. So a lot of older people worry about the changes that they see in their memory. There are some changes that are normal and some changes that could indicate that there's some kind of problem occurring. So for example it's normal to forget that you need to pick milk up on the way home from work. It's normal to forget where you parked your car but it is not normal to forget for example the meanings of words that you know. We measure memory and cognition in CLSA in a number of ways. We use tests that are standardized so what I mean by that is that they've been used in a lot of different people and we know quite well how people perform doing these tasks. So we look at a variety of domains or areas of cognition that are known to be affected in aging. So for example we look at something called prospective memory which is remembering that you need to do something either at a specific time or when something happens so you can imagine this is very relevant for everyday life where you have to remember to take your medications, to go to the supermarket, all kinds of things and we know that that is something that declines very early on when people are starting to show cognitive problems. We also look at things like language functions so we'll ask people to produce lists of words. We ask them to remember lists of words which is another type of memory and basically we assess all of the domains that are relevant for aging research. I am hoping that CLSA will allow us to learn a lot about language and cognition and how these change over time so personally of course I'm interested in what the effect of bilingualism is and how people who are bilingual change in terms of their language function over time. I think that it will allow us to identify early markers of changes and cognition so that for example if we know that somebody is at risk of developing Alzheimer's disease we're able to start intervening as soon as possible in the process. So following people over 20 years is a very long time for us to observe what normal aging looks like and what healthy aging looks like and what types of changes are perhaps suggesting that there might be a problem in the future.